Sidonie Perceval, an established French writer, is mourning her deceased husband. Invited to Japan for the reedition of her first book, she is welcomed by her local editor who takes her to Kyoto, the city of shrines and temples. As they travel together through the Japanese spring blossoms, she slowly opens up to him. But the ghost of her husband follows Sidonie: she will have to finally let go of the past to let herself love again.
Diane is a mysterious and lonely teenager. Sharing special bonds with her father Christian, she takes care of the education of her brother Marc. The arrival of Julia in the neighborhood, a charismatic and liberated young British woman, is going to disturb Diane’s daily life. Desperately willing to become an adult, Diane is going to live, for a semester, the most shattering experiences of her life. The more she gets close to Julia, the more she gets irresponsible, ignoring consequences and limits to her desires.
Young and full of life, Murielle has a promising future ahead of her when she meets and falls head over heels for Mounir. A wedding soon follows, and the happy couple quickly set about preparing to make a family. However, with family come ties, and none come as tight as that between Mounir and his adoptive father. As Murielle continues to bring new life into the family, frictions between Mounir and Doctor Pinget reach boiling point. Helpless to extract her husband and children from the wealthy nest that Doctor Pinget has provided for them, Murielle is drawn into an unhealthy family dynamic. There is only one way out of this nightmare, and for Murielle all sense of reasoning begins to abandon her.
Along with her husband and three children, Marthe lives in an eden of her own creation, nearly isolated from the rest of the world. The arrival of a construction vehicle, however, pierces their tranquil, hermetic existence—before long a disused highway has been re-opened, and the family finds their home situated in the midst of rush-hour traffic. While the privileges of clean air, quietude and privacy are thus denied them, Marthe remains determined to stay no matter the cost.
Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells king Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. These are stories based on whatever will be happening in Portugal during the production time of the film. As in the book, these stories will be tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events. This film will be about the reality of a disgraced country, Portugal, under the effects of a global economic crisis.
Mojtaba, Hamzeh, Zar are among other individuals who have been thrown into prison and ideologically interrogated in Iran. In this documentary, the director wants them to interrogate him as agents of the Islamic Republic might. He would like the real torturer in Iran to see himself through the film as if in a mirror. The violent experience of putting themselves in the torturer's head confronts them with their own limits and the ambivalence of the project itself.
A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.
Pauline juggles life between her kids and her work as a landscape designer where she has to fight for her place amongst her male colleagues. Her life is turned upside-down when her mother tells her that she is going to live abroad and will no longer be able to take care of her children, then becomes chaotic when she is appointed manager of an important project. On all fronts, her life takes a turn for the worse.
In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.
In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men : “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad !
Frank, a man of action who worked his way up all by himself, dedicates his life to work. No matter the place or the circumstances, be it day or night, he’s on the phone, handling the cargo ships he charters for major companies. But when he has to deal with a crisis situation, Frank makes a brutal decision and gets fired. Profoundly shaken, betrayed by a system to which he gave his all, he has to progressively question himself to save the one connection that still matters to him: the bond he’s managed to maintain with his youngest daughter, Mathilde.
One winter evening, at an empty gas station, young country musician Sami meets beautiful Julia, who has run out of gas. Sami, who’s been living alone in his car since his ex kicked him out, invites Julia back to “his place” for the night.
Summer '76, there's a heatwave and the Swiss countryside is drying out at top speed. In this stifling environment, Gus who is thirteen years old and son of a farmer, sees both his family environment and his innocence relentlessly breaking. He's living the end of a world.
Unable to meet all the demands of his job and family anymore, Mathieu feels he's in a mid-life crisis and hurriedly leaves for the forest. His relatives are left by themselves, faced with his sudden departure and their choices.
Germain, an introspective retiree, abruptly becomes a widower at 75. He barely has the time to realize what has happened to him before his family forces their way into his daily life: non-stop phone calls and visits, meals and activities organized in advance – all meant to make his life as regular as clockwork. But Germain’s mind is elsewhere. Honoring a promise he made to his dear departed wife, he suddenly finds himself at the heart of a contemporary dance company’s newest work.
In a moment of anger in a grocery store in Lausanne, a father loses patience and disciplines his disobedient child. A shocked customer immediately intervenes to express her concern. Other customers join the conversation and the discussion soon turns into a debate that gradually gets out of hand.
Orphan, Oskar lives with Elvis and Fanny Egger, his guardians. Oskar is waiting for one thing, the majority, to finally be able to go to Zimbabwe and start a new life. While Oskar strives to raise money to get there, Elvis takes Oskar's success and makes it cost him to graduate. The balance of power is becoming more and more tense, swinging into a violence that will push Oskar to definitively abandon childhood, and Elvis, to fall the mask of his ambition and his madness.
What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is mentally ill. Her father wants to see her returned to the psychiatric clinic, but Léa refuses to see her mother in the same light: Suzanne is happy – even if she doesn’t act like others expect her to. She appears to live a joyfully infantile existence after calmly letting go of life’s pressures. Léa captures her mother’s life on film and focuses her attention on examining the old super-8 films from the family archives. When she is left to drive her mother back to the clinic after a weekend at home, Léa grabs her opportunity: She turns the car around and whisks Suzanne off on a journey; a road trip without the judgements of others. AVANTI follows a mother-daughter relationship with an ease and depth that highlights the complexity of the emotional ties within a family.
Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.
Since the 1970s, Switzerland has been characterized by a sometimes controversial, sometimes innovative drug policy that has become a model for other countries around the world. Using archive footage and interviews with contemporary witnesses - politicians, social workers and former drug addicts - the film reconstructs key moments in this turbulent chapter of national politics.
